She’s a survivor like no other, and the mixed pleasure of inhabiting her jagged psyche is the best reason for reading this...
A vividly portrayed, most unconventional protagonist dominates this punchy first novel from an award-winning British short-story writer.
She’s 30-year-old Lily O’Connor, a sufferer from temporal lobe epilepsy since early childhood, when her intemperate and unstable mother threw her down a flight of stairs. Lily tells her own story, which begins when her mother (from whom she was “taken away” following the aforementioned “accident”) dies, and Lily leaves her entry-level job taking tickets at an amusement park arcade and heads for London, seeking her two brothers. She finds—but discovers she has nothing in common with—sleek, self-absorbed Barry, a professional card player interested in nothing beyond training himself for the World Poker Open. But Mikey, the brother she loved, who had gone missing years earlier, is still nowhere to be found. Adrift in London (which she envisions as “a pile of bodies writhing like fat worms in a fisherman’s box”), Lily makes connections doomed to short-circuit: with Mel, the woman Cambridge grad and banker who takes her in (and undoubtedly loves Lily, secretly and guiltily); and with the cryptic Dave, a smug, secretive electrician (symbols clash here) who becomes her lover and abuser, echoing the pattern in which preadolescent Lily had been caught up with her mother’s creepy boyfriend Don. The details of such relationships are clichéd, and there’s too much of the social worker’s casebook in other’s observations of Lily. But whenever we’re inside her own thoughts and perceptions, the novel soars. Innovative typography helps: images of pills Lily takes, lined up in a row; skewed, distorted jumbles of letters, denoting her frequent convulsive seizures. And Lily’s voice is impressive—raw, angry, emotionally urgent, rising frequently to inchoate poetry (e.g., water in a canal runs “oily and slow …. sound[s] like treacle glooping. Stench like burnt toast”).
She’s a survivor like no other, and the mixed pleasure of inhabiting her jagged psyche is the best reason for reading this daring tightrope-walk of a novel.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7035-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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